For over thirty years, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has awarded those paving the way for freedom and innovation in the digital world. Countless luminaries working in digital privacy and free speech gathered for this Pioneer Award Ceremony in San Francisco over the decades. This year, we are excited to relaunch that annual celebration as the first-ever EFF Awards!
The EFF Awards is a new ceremony dedicated to the growing digital rights communities whose technical, social, economic, and cultural contributions are changing the world. We can feel the impact of their work in diverse fields such as journalism, art, digital access, legislation, tech development, and law.
All are invited to attend the EFF Awards ceremony! The celebration will begin at 6 pm. PT, Thursday, November 10 at The Regency Lodge, 1290 Van Ness Ave. in San Francisco. Register today to attend in person. At 7 pm PT, the awards ceremony will stream live and free on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
We are honored to present our three winners of this year's EFF Awards: Alaa Abd El-Fattah, Digital Defense Fund, and Kyle Wiens. But before the ceremony kick off, we want to take a closer look at each of our honorees. Up next, Digital Defense Fund, EFF Award for Civil Rights Technology :
Digital Defense Fund was launched in 2017 to meet the abortion rights movement’s increased need for security and technology resources after the 2016 election. This “multidisciplinary team of organizers, engineers, designers, abortion fund and practical support volunteers” provides digital security and technology support to abortion rights and provider organizations as well as individual organizers.
“DDF’s commitment to building resources for a thriving, resilient, growing abortion access movement has strengthened the field’s transition to digital strategies,” said Cynthia Conti-Cook, a technology fellow working with the Ford Foundation’s Gender, Racial, and Ethnic Justice team. “Its generous contributions and collaborations with other movements makes DDF so much more than an abortion access digital services organization—it has become a model for embedding movement-aligned technical expertise and a platform for fostering cross-movement learning and strategies.”
The fund’s staff provides digital security evaluations, conducts staff training, maintains a library of go-to resources on reproductive justice and digital privacy, and builds software for abortion access organizations.
DDF’s mission to leverage technology to defend and secure access to abortion became even more crucial with this year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, which ended the half-century of abortion rights protected under Roe v. Wade. Despite this setback and the ensuing proliferation of state abortion bans, DDF continues to pursue its vision of “a future where technology and innovation support secure, autonomous reproductive decisions, free from stigma.”
“I don’t think as a culture we recognize, respect, or take care of our digital selves,” DDF Director Kate Bertash tweeted in July. “The me that lives in my machines and across cloud servers of our online spaces is the me that most interacts with the wider world. She deserves as much privacy and protection as physical me.”
Attend the first-ever EFF Awards In Person
